Help keep Salon independent

The fallibility of two-factor authentication: Is your money really safe?

Two-factor authentication (2FA) has emerged as a critical tool to prevent cybercrime. This functionality provides an additional layer of security beyond traditional password-based authentication. 

By requiring users to provide additional verification, such as a code sent to their mobile device, 2FA has made it more challenging for cybercriminals to gain unauthorized access to user accounts. 

However, as hackers continue to refine their tactics, experts say users need more than 2FA to guarantee security.

The Potential Pitfalls of 2FA

While 2FA enhances security, it can also foster a false sense of confidence. 2FA seems foolproof, leading many people to pay less attention to other security practices, like using strong, unique passwords for each account. 

The effectiveness of 2FA varies considerably depending on the specific implementation method employed. SMS-based 2FA (i.e., a code sent by text message) is particularly vulnerable to a range of attacks, including SIM swapping, where cybercriminals trick mobile carriers into transferring a victim's phone number to a SIM card under their control, allowing them to intercept 2FA codes and gain access to the associated accounts. 

"In the world of cybersecurity, adaptability is key," said Alissa Knight, Managing Partner at Knight Group. "The future of authentication lies in methods resilient to human error and technological compromise, such as hardware-based keys or biometric verification. It's not about making it impossible to hack—it's about making it not worth the effort. Cybersecurity controls should always be implemented in layers like an onion," she explained.

Related

Hack-proof your finances: How to protect your personal data like a cybersecurity expert

"An emerging layer that should be included as a Best Practice is the ability to capture 'proof of life' behind the device," said authID CEO Rhon Daguro. "The current multi-layer approach assumes or guesses who the person behind the device is, so with liveness of biometrics, we no longer have to guess, we can capture 'proof of life' of the real person behind the device. Adding a biometrics layer will complete your security best practices in the modern era." 

The lack of encryption in SMS messages also renders them susceptible to interception by hackers, further undermining the security of this 2FA method.

The Evolving Threat Landscape: How Hackers Circumvent 2FA

As 2FA has become more widely adopted, hackers have developed increasingly sophisticated techniques to bypass security measures. 

One particularly insidious tactic is the man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack, in which a hacker intercepts the communication between a user and a service provider and captures the 2FA code. This approach allows the attacker to log in as the user without their knowledge, often before the victim realizes their account has been compromised.

Phishing attacks are also effective in circumventing 2FA. The user may receive a message containing a link to a fraudulent login page that closely mimics a legitimate site. When the user enters their credentials and 2FA code, the fake site relays this information to the actual site, enabling the hacker to access the user's account. Advanced phishing kits can even intercept 2FA codes in real time, allowing attackers to log in before the user becomes aware of the breach.

We need your help to stay independent

Subscribe today to support Salon's progressive journalism

Complacency and Single Points of Failure: The Risks of Over-Reliance on 2FA

One of the dangers associated with 2FA is the potential for user complacency. When individuals feel overly secure, they may become less vigilant about other essential security measures, such as being cautious of phishing attempts or regularly updating their passwords. This false sense of security can be problematic in the face of increasingly sophisticated phishing attacks.

Using the same device for password entry and 2FA reception creates a single point of failure if the device is compromised by malware. If an attacker gains control of a user's device, they may be able to access both the password and the 2FA code, effectively rendering the additional security layer moot.

Best Practices for Secure Authentication in the Modern Era

To mitigate the risks associated with 2FA and ensure a robust security posture, individuals and organizations need to adopt a multi-layered approach to authentication and access control. Some critical best practices include:

1. Implementing strong, unique passwords for each account and utilizing password management tools for secure password storage and generation.

2. Favoring more secure 2FA methods, such as authenticator apps (such as Duo Security and Google Authenticator) or hardware security keys, (such as Yubico) over SMS-based 2FA.

3. Remaining vigilant against phishing attempts by scrutinizing the source and legitimacy of all messages before clicking on links or entering sensitive information.

4. Periodically review and update security settings, including 2FA methods and trusted contacts, to ensure that accounts remain secure even if devices are lost or compromised.

5. Advanced log-in systems, such as WebAuthn and U2F, leverage cryptographic keys to verify user identity for high-value accounts and sensitive data.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Empowering Consumers Through Cybersecurity Education 

As digital threats grow, consumers must understand their role and stay up to date on the latest security risks and best practices to protect data and accounts.

Consumers can protect themselves against digital threats by learning and adopting a proactive approach to cybersecurity.  Security websites such as Krebs on Security and The Hacker News are two reputable sources. As people become better at spotting and reducing risks, they improve their own security and help make the online world safer for everyone.

"Users must keep up in this cat-and-mouse game," said Joe Gaczewski, CISO at Tokio Marine Highland. "The latest tool offered by some browsers and devices is the passkey… 2FA is better than a password only, but we must be mindful of fatigue and mindlessly clicking 'approve.'"

Embracing a Multi-Layered Approach to Authentication Security

As the cyber threat landscape continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, 2FA, while useful in the fight against cybercrime, is not a silver bullet. To safeguard their data and assets, individuals and organizations must adopt a multi-layered approach to authentication security, combining 2FA with other essential best practices, such as strong password management, regular device and software updates, and ongoing user education.

Read more

about money

Amazon says it’s going “water positive” — but there’s a problem

Earlier this year, the e-commerce corporation Amazon secured approval to open two new data centers in Santiago, Chile. The $400 million venture is the company’s first foray into locating its data facilities, which guzzle massive amounts of electricity and water in order to power cloud computing services and online programs, in Latin America — and in one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, where residents have protested against the industry’s expansion.

This week, the tech giant made a separate but related announcement. It plans to invest in water conservation along the Maipo River, which is the primary source of water for the Santiago region. Amazon will partner with a water technology startup to help farmers along the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 acres of farmland. The plan is poised to conserve enough water to supply around 300 homes per year, and it’s part of Amazon’s campaign to make its cloud computing operations “water positive” by 2030, meaning the company’s web services division will conserve or replenish more water than it uses up.

Related

Amazon says its plastic packaging can be recycled. An investigation finds it usually isn’t

The reasoning behind this water initiative is clear: Data centers require large amounts of water to cool their servers, and Amazon plans to spend $100 billion to build more of them over the next decade as part of a big bet on its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform. Other tech companies such as Microsoft and Meta, which are also investing in data centers to sustain the artificial-intelligence boom, have made similar water pledges amid a growing controversy about the sector’s thirst for water and power.

Amazon claims that its data centers are already among the most water-efficient in the industry, and it plans to roll out more conservation projects to mitigate its thirst. However, just like corporate pledges to reach “net-zero” emissions, these water pledges are more complex than they seem at first glance. While the company has indeed taken steps to cut water usage at its facilities, its calculations don’t account for the massive water needs of the power plants that keep the lights on at those very same facilities. Without a larger commitment to mitigating Amazon’s underlying stress on electricity grids, conservation efforts by the company and its fellow tech giants will only tackle part of the problem, according to experts who spoke to Grist.

The powerful servers in large data centers run hot as they process unprecedented amounts of information, and keeping them from overheating requires both water and electricity. Rather than try to keep these rooms cool with traditional air-conditioning units, many companies use water as a coolant, running it past the servers to chill them out. The centers also need huge amounts of electricity to run all their servers: They already account for around 3 percent of U.S. power demand, a number that could more than double by 2030. On top of that, the coal, gas, and nuclear power plants that produce that electricity themselves consume even larger quantities of water to stay cool.

Will Hewes, who leads water sustainability for Amazon Web Services, told Grist that the company uses water in its data centers in order to save on energy-intensive air conditioning units, thus reducing its reliance on fossil fuels. 

“Using water for cooling in most places really reduces the amount of energy that we use, and so it helps us meet other sustainability goals,” he said. “We could always decide to not use water for cooling, but we want to, a lot, because of those energy and efficiency benefits.”

It’s almost certain that this number has ballooned even higher in recent years as companies have built more centers to keep up with the artificial-intelligence boom.

In order to save on energy costs, the company’s data centers have to evaporate millions of gallons of water per year. It’s hard to say for sure how much water the data center industry consumes, but the ballpark estimates are substantial. One 2021 study found that U.S. data centers consumed around 415,000 acre-feet of water in 2018, even before the artificial-intelligence boom. That’s enough to supply around a million average homes annually, or about as much as California’s Imperial Valley takes from the Colorado River each year to grow winter vegetables. Another study found that data centers operated by Microsoft, Google, and Meta withdrew twice as much water from rivers and aquifers as the entire country of Denmark. 

It’s almost certain that this number has ballooned even higher in recent years as companies have built more centers to keep up with the artificial-intelligence boom, since AI programs such as ChatGPT require massive amounts of server real estate. Tech companies have built hundreds of new data centers in the last few years alone, and they are planning hundreds more. One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides. The on-site water consumption at any one of these companies’ data centers could now rival that of a major beverage company such as PepsiCo. 

Amazon doesn’t provide statistics on its absolute water consumption; Hewes told Grist the company is “focused on efficiency.” However, the tech giant’s water usage is likely lower than some of its competitors — in part because the company has built most of its data centers with so-called evaporative cooling systems, which require far less water than other cooling technologies and only turn on when temperatures get too high. The company pegs its water usage at around 10 percent of the industry average, and in temperate locations such as Sweden, it doesn’t use any water to cool down data centers except during peak summer temperatures. 

Companies can reduce the environmental impact of their AI business by building them in temperate regions that have plenty of water, but they must balance those efficiency concerns with concerns about land and electricity costs, as well as the need to be close to major customers. Recent studies have found that data center water consumption in the U.S. is “skewed toward water stressed subbasins” in places like the Southwest, but Amazon has clustered much of its business farther east, especially in Virginia, which boasts cheap power and financial incentives for tech firms.

“A lot of the locations are driven by customer needs, but also by [prices for] real estate and power,” said Hewes. “Some big portions of our data center footprint are in places that aren’t super hot, that aren’t in super water stressed regions. Virginia, Ohio — they get hot in the summer, but then there are big chunks of the year where we don’t need to use water for cooling.”  Even so, the company’s expansion in Virginia is already causing concerns over water availability.

To mitigate its impacts in such basins, the company also funds dozens of conservation and recharge projects like the one in Chile. It donates recycled water from its data centers to farmers, who use it to irrigate their crops, and it has also helped restore the rivers that supply water-stressed cities such as Cape Town, South Africa; in northern Virginia, it has worked to install cover crop farmland that can reduce runoff pollution in local waterways. The company treats these projects the way other companies treat carbon offsets, counting each gallon recharged against a gallon it consumes at its data centers. Amazon said in its most recent sustainability report that it is 41 percent of the way to meeting its goal of being “water positive.” In other words, it has funded projects that recharge or conserve a little over 4 gallons of water for every 10 gallons of water it uses. 

But despite all this, the company’s water stewardship goal doesn’t include the water consumed by the power plants that supply its data centers. This consumption can be as much as three to 10 times as large as the on-site water consumption at a data center, according to Shaolei Ren, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Riverside, who studies data center water usage. As an example, Ren pointed to an Amazon data center in Pennsylvania that relies on a nuclear power plant less than a mile away. That data center uses around 20 percent of the power plant’s capacity.

“They say they’re using very little water, but there’s a big water evaporation happening just nearby, and that’s for powering their data center,” he said.

Companies like Amazon can reduce this secondary water usage by relying on renewable energy sources, which don’t require anywhere near as much water as traditional power plants. Hewes says the company has been trying to “manage down” both water and energy needs through a separate goal of operating on 100 percent renewable energy, but Ren points out that the company’s data centers need round-the-clock power, which means intermittently available renewables like solar and wind farms can only go so far.

Amazon isn’t the only company dealing with this problem. CyrusOne, another major data center firm, revealed in its sustainability report earlier this year that it used more than eight times as much water to source power as it did on-site at its data centers.

“As long as we are reliant on grid electricity that includes thermoelectric sources to power our facilities, we are indirectly responsible for the consumption of large amounts of water in the production of that electricity,” the report said.

As for replenishment projects like the one in Chile, they too will only go part of the way toward reducing the impact of the data center explosion. Even if Amazon’s cloud operations are “water positive” on a global scale, with projects in many of the same basins where it owns data centers, that doesn’t mean it won’t still compromise water access in specific watersheds. The company’s data centers and their power plants may still withdraw more water than the company replenishes in a given area, and replenishment projects in other aquifers around the world won’t address the physical consequences of that specific overdraft.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing, but I think it’s not really reducing the actual consumption,” Ren said. “It masks out a lot of real problems, because water is a really regional issue.”

Correction: This story has been corrected to clarify that Amazon’s “water positive” pledge applies only to its web services division.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/technology/amazon-data-centers-water-positive-energy/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Read more

about environmental impacts

Trump’s “smart ones” play the part: Black MAGA steps up as the racism ramps up

Donald Trump demonstrates every day that he is truly America’s first White President. The former president's latest display of the behavior that earned him such an ignominious title occurred at a recent rally in Pennsylvania during which Trump singled out Republican Rep. Byron Donalds.

“That one is smart. You have smart ones and then you have some that aren’t quite so good.”  Trump did not offer any explicit explanation for who the "not-so-good ones” are.

Byron Donalds is a Black man. He is also a prominent Trump campaign surrogate. Trump’s “praise” of Donalds as one of "the smart ones" is quite familiar to most Black Americans. It is a version of such white racist language and logic as “you are not like the other ones” or “you are so articulate.” The underlying assumption is that Black people as a group are stupid, dumb, unintelligent, inherently childlike and primitive, possess “bad culture” and in other ways are inferior to white people.

White Americans and most other non-Black people in this society almost certainly understand Trump’s meaning as well. Racism is a cultural practice and set of widely understood and learned behaviors. In that way, Americans are highly “literate” in racism and white supremacy even if they do not consciously subscribe to such values and beliefs.

Trump’s “praise” of Donalds is part of a larger pattern where the corrupt ex-president identifies “his” so-called special African-Americans to metamorphically — if not literally — pat on the head at his rallies and other events. Trump does this as a way of immunizing himself against charges that he is racist. It is a version of the “my best Black (or brown) friend” defense that many white people use when confronted by their racist behavior. In reality, such praise, especially from someone like Trump who is generally of poor character and has repeatedly shown himself to be a racist and a white supremacist, is an insult and act of gross condescension towards any self-respecting Black person.

We need your help to stay independent

Subscribe today to support Salon's progressive journalism

In his new book, Trump’s nephew, Fred Trump III, alleges that the corrupt ex-president uses racial slurs against Black people in private. Donald Trump’s public praise of Black people is disingenuous poison.

As author and political commentator Keith Boykin explained in a post on X/Twitter, “Trump’s describing Rep. Byron Donalds today as one of the 'smart ones' continues his disturbing racial pattern of tokenizing Black men for his political needs.”

The claim that there are “good Blacks” and “bad Blacks” is an example of old-fashioned racism where, by some standard established by white people (in this case a white man such as Trump), the “good Blacks” are compliant, happy and grateful, do not challenge white society, and fulfill societal expectations and stereotypes that are in agreement with white fantasies about Black people as being happy in a subordinate status and who place the emotional and other needs of white people above their own.

Several weeks ago, at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago, Trump attacked Kamala Harris’s personhood as a Black woman, suggesting that she is some type of racial trickster figure who can’t make up her mind if she is Black or Indian. This is another example of Donald Trump being so arrogant and racist as to decide, per his criteria as a 78-year-old white man, who the "real" and "fake", and the “good” and the “bad” Blacks are. 

Trump has made similar claims about “good” and “bad” members of other ethnic and racial minority groups as well. For example, Trump has repeatedly described Jewish Americans who do not support him and the Republican Party as being “bad Jews" who need to "have their heads examined." During a July radio interview, Trump agreed with the host’s slur that Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff is a “crappy Jew.” [For Donald Trump, given his extreme egomania and other pathological behavior, the most important criteria for deciding who is a “good” or “bad” person is if they like him or not.]

Last week, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell offered an explosive critique of Donald Trump and his long history of racist and white supremacist behavior. During an extended monologue, O’Donnell pondered is Donald Trump “the most racist president in history who has not owned slaves?” It will be the task of historians and other experts to answer O’Donnell’s question. Based on the evidence, their answer will likely be quite damning.

Donald Trump’s racist and white supremacist praise of Byron Donalds as one of the “smart ones” is not “harmless,” a “gaffe,” or just Trump “riffing.” Such behavior is part of a centuries-old political strategy in America.

Sooner rather than later, Kamala Harris is going to have to directly and forcefully respond to Trump’s racist, sexist and other vile attacks on her personhood.

Trump is a political entrepreneur. His behavior is based on a calculation, correct or not, that it will pay political dividends. Here, Trump and his advisors have decided that racism and other “politically incorrect behavior” will be a net gain because Trump’s followers and other potential voters will respond positively to it. Based on the evidence, such a conclusion is not an unreasonable one.

For example, those white Americans who hold racist and racially resentful values towards Black and brown people are more likely to support the Republican Party and Donald Trump than they are the Democrats. Trumpists are also much more likely to hold racist and white supremacist values than are the general public. Contrary to the mainstream news media’s repeatedly disproved conclusion that it was (white) “working class” anxiety that drove Trump’s support in 2016 and 2020, political scientists and other experts have shown that it is actually white racism and white racial resentment that were and are the primary determinants of support for Trump(ism). A majority of Trump and Republican voters now believe in the antisemitic white supremacist Great Replacement conspiracy theory that non-whites are being “imported” into the country to “replace” white people. Other research has shown that a large percentage, if not the majority of white Republicans and Trumpists, would support a dictatorship in America instead of sharing equal political and social power with non-whites.

In a new essay, Thomas Hartmann details how Trump’s racism and white supremacy are part of a much older political strategy of social dominance behavior and targeting the Other in American (and global) society:

“Identity politics” can be either helpful to society or destructive of social cohesion and democracy itself. When used to bring people of different races, religions, and gender identities into the larger structure of society — to empower and lift up those who’ve traditionally been oppressed — identity politics becomes a platform for ultimately ending itself; once everybody has equal opportunity, it’s no longer needed.

The dark side of identity politics occurs when the dominant race/religion/gender (in today’s America that’s white Christian men) identifies people who aren’t part of their group as an “other” and uses this otherness as a rallying cry to enlist members of the powerful in-group against the “outsiders.”

This is what the GOP has been doing ever since 1968, when Richard Nixon picked up the white racist vote that Democrats abandoned in 1964/1965 when LBJ pushed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act through Congress.

Nixon talked about his white “silent majority.” Reagan emphasized “states’ rights” to suppress the civil and voting rights of minorities. GHW Bush used Willie Horton to scare white voters in 1988 the same way his son vilified Muslims to win re-election in 2004. And, of course, Trump has been “othering” nonwhite people and women ever since he started his notoriously racist and hateful birther movement in 2008.

Quite predictably, Donald Trump’s racist and white supremacist “praise” of Byron Donalds was not widely covered by the mainstream American news media.

Racial attitudes and beliefs are not about what is in someone’s heart, their intent, or bad words. Instead, racial attitudes and beliefs are a normative judgment about society, how it should be organized, and which groups and individuals should be privileged or not based on their perceived racial identity or other group membership. As such, a politician or other leader’s racial attitudes and beliefs are inherently an important matter of public concern and “newsworthy.” But the mainstream news no longer views Trump's racist behavior as meriting much attention because it is not new or novel (“it is all just Trump being Trump” and “Everyone knows already!”). Such a decision normalizes white racism and white supremacy and minimizes its negative impact on Black and brown people and American society as a whole.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

At this point in the election, Trump’s preliminary racist (and sexist) attacks on Kamala Harris have not been effective. Polls and other research show that Trump may actually lose independent and other voters outside of his base because his racism and other crude behavior are viewed as being another indication that he is a chaotic and disruptive figure who American society needs to move past.

The challenge for Trump and his campaign is going to be how to modulate the racist, white supremacist, and other attacks in such a way as to damage Kamala Harris by presenting her as someone “out of step” with “real Americans” without being so overt as to push away non-MAGA voters — or perhaps even mobilize them against him.

In an excellent new essay at CNN, Stephen Collinson highlights how Trump and his campaign are attacking Harris’ racial identity as representative of her supposed untrustworthiness: “He and his running mate, JD Vance, implied her mixed race — heritage that millions of Americans share — is evidence of a sinister 'chameleon'-like character that also explains policy reversals on energy and immigration. In an ugly moment, he amplified a sexually themed social media slander against her. And his dark campaign ads allege she will slash Social Security benefits by welcoming millions of undocumented migrants to the country.”

Collinson continues, “Trump’s invective amounts to some of the most hardline political rhetoric in years, even by his own standards, and means the next two months are likely to be brutal.

The question is whether this barrage of negative attacks is merely successful in stoking feelings of existential anger Trump uses to drive his base to the polls, or whether it begins to tarnish Harris at the margins in battleground states.”

At this point, Harris is not emphasizing her racial background, identity or the truly historic nature of her presidential campaign. Instead, she is offering a more hopeful and positive vision of America’s future as compared to the darkness, chaos, negativity, and threats of revenge and dictatorship offered by Trump.

Sooner rather than later, Kamala Harris is going to have to directly and forcefully respond to Trump’s racist, sexist and other vile attacks on her personhood. She cannot continue to just brush them off or use them to mock Trump.

When Harris finally directly engages Trump on these matters it will be an opportunity to claim (even more) moral authority and to frame the 2024 election as a referendum on the country’s national character. Kamala Harris is a quintessential American. Ultimately, Harris’s life story as the child of immigrants, and now the first Black and South Asian woman to be nominated by a major party as its presidential candidate, is a powerful weapon that can be used to beat back the new Jim and Jane Crow apartheid and an attempt to bring American back to the worst part of its history that Trump and his neofascist MAGA movement represent.

Read more

about this topic

Quashing dissent on campus is the norm

With nearly 18 million students on U.S. college campuses this fall, defenders of the war on Gaza don’t want to hear any backtalk. Silence is complicity, and that’s the way Israel’s allies like it. For them, the new academic term restarts a threat to the status quo. But for supporters of human rights, it’s a renewed opportunity to turn higher education into something more than a comfort zone.

In the United States, the extent and arrogance of the emerging collegiate repression is, quite literally, breathtaking.

Every day, people are dying due to their transgression of breathing while Palestinian. The Gaza death toll adds up to more than one Kristallnacht per day — for upwards of 333 days and counting, with no end in sight. The shattering of a society’s entire infrastructure has been horrendous. Months ago, citing data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, ABC News reported that “25,000 buildings have been destroyed, 32 hospitals forced out of service, and three churches, 341 mosques and 100 universities and schools destroyed.” 

Not that this should disturb the tranquility of campuses in the country whose taxpayers and elected leaders make it all possible. Top college officials wax eloquent about the sanctity of higher learning and academic freedom while they suppress protests against policies that have destroyed scores of universities in Palestine.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

A key rationale for quashing dissent is that anti-Israel protests make some Jewish students uncomfortable. But the purposes of college education shouldn’t include always making people feel comfortable. How comfortable should students be in a nation enabling mass murder in Gaza?

What would we say about claims that students in the North with Southern accents should not have been made uncomfortable by on-campus civil rights protests and denunciations of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s? Or white students from South Africa, studying in the United States, made uncomfortable by anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s?

A bedrock for the edifice of speech suppression and virtual thought-policing is the old standby of equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Likewise, the ideology of Zionism that tries to justify Israeli policies is supposed to get a pass no matter what — while opponents, including many Jews, are liable to be denounced as antisemites.

But polling shows that more younger Americans are supportive of Palestinians than they are of Israelis. The ongoing atrocities by the Israel “Defense” Forces in Gaza, killing a daily average of more than 100 people — mostly children and women — have galvanized many young people to take action in the United States.

 

“Protests rocked American campuses toward the end of the last academic year,” a front-page New York Times story reported in late August, adding: “Many administrators remain shaken by the closing weeks of the spring semester, when encampments, building occupations and clashes with the police helped lead to thousands of arrests across the country.” (Overall, the phrase “clashes with the police” served as a euphemism for police violently attacking nonviolent protesters.) 

From the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites inhabited by so many college presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are scarcely more than abstractions compared to far more real priorities. An understated sentence from the Times sheds a bit of light: “The strategies that are coming into public view suggest that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that permissiveness is perilous, and that a harder line may be the best option — or perhaps just the one least likely to invite blowback from elected officials and donors who have demanded that universities take stronger action against protesters.”

We need your help to stay independent

Subscribe today to support Salon's progressive journalism

Much more clarity is available from a new Mondoweiss article by activist Carrie Zaremba, a researcher with training in anthropology. “University administrators across the United States have declared an indefinite state of emergency on college campuses,” she wrote. “Schools are rolling out policies in preparation for quashing pro-Palestine student activism this fall semester, and reshaping regulations and even campuses in the process to suit this new normal.

“Many of these policies being instituted share a common formula: more militarization, more law enforcement, more criminalization, and more consolidation of institutional power. But where do these policies originate and why are they so similar across all campuses? The answer lies in the fact that they have been provided by the ‘risk and crisis management’ consulting industries, with the tacit support of trustees, Zionist advocacy groups, and federal agencies. Together, they deploy the language of safety to disguise a deeper logic of control and securitization.”

Countering such top-down moves will require intensive grassroots organizing. Sustained pushback against campus repression will be essential, to continually assert the right to speak out and protest as guaranteed by the First Amendment. 

Insistence on acquiring knowledge while gaining power for progressive forces will be vital. That’s why the national Teach-In Network was launched this week by the RootsAction Education Fund (which I help lead), under the banner “Knowledge Is Power — and Our Grassroots Movements Need Both.”

The elites that were appalled by the moral uprising on college campuses against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza are now doing all they can to prevent a resurgence of that uprising. But the mass murder continues, subsidized by the U.S. government. Students who insist that true knowledge and ethical action need each other, help make history and not just study it.

Read more

about this topic

Bureaucracy is despised for inefficiency and waste. But it might just save us from climate change

The term "bureaucrat" has held a negative connotation pretty much since it was invented, especially when applied to governments. Described by Irish novelist Lady Morgan as "office tyranny" in 1818, bureaucracies have been widely loathed ever since, from the literature of Franz Kafka to a catchy animated song in "Futurama."

Government bureaucrats are often depicted as wasteful and inefficient bleeding hearts with secret, sinister and sometimes "socialist" agendas. Former president Ronald Reagan famously denounced bureaucrats throughout his political career — and, four decades later, Donald Trump and his acolytes did so in their own way by decrying a supposed "Deep State."

Trump, the current Republican presidential nominee, has vowed to fire career civil servants en masse and replace them with loyalists, specifically laying out how he will do this through Agenda 47 and Project 2025. He even recently said he will appoint billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to help him cut "trillions" in government spending through a "government efficiency commission" to audit the entire federal government.

Yet according to experts who spoke with Salon, this kind of anti-bureaucratic sentiment can have profoundly negative policy consequences, especially when it comes to regulations that protect the planet. Scholars who study bureaucracies agree that these organizations are actually more important than ever. Indeed, humanity's ongoing survival as a species will depend on many of the bureaucracies that Trump and Musk wish to eliminate, such as energy regulatiors, environmental agencies and any institution that holds fossil fuel and other companies responsible for greenhouse gas emissions.

"Repression of social problems by governments allow bureaucracies to rot and become sclerotic as the social pressure builds to the point where bureaucracies are exploded."

The Trump/Musk perspective is distinctly ahistorical. Bureaucracies have already helped Earth avoid potential life-ending catastrophes: International coalitions of governments and private entities worked together to protect the ozone layer when they learned releasing chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) was destroying it, and did so again to reduce the impact of acid rain when environmental activists raised the alarm.

Conversely, history is riddled with examples of occasions when a well-managed bureaucracy might have averted considerable calamity. Perhaps most infamously, the incompetence and corruption of the Soviet bureaucracy was so severe that, when the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine experienced a disaster, the bureaucrats threw their own citizens under the bus to cover up their mistake. Decades later, the ruthless march of deregulation implemented by neoliberal presidents like Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush resulted in the economic crash of 2008. Climate change is as severe as it is today in part because fossil fuel companies subsidized spreading misinformation to justify energy deregulation during the Bush era.

While reactionaries, red-baiters and the rich have long tried to weaken regulatory bodies, there have also long been public figures who recognized their value. Other Americans have advocated for strong bureaucracies to monitor potentially apocalyptic activities like testing weapons of mass destruction as far back as Adlai Stevenson's 1956 presidential campaign.

On a global scale, American scientists realized starting in the late 1960s that pollution could make the Earth uninhabitable to future generations, with 1972 presidential frontrunner Edmund Muskie famously staking his candidacy on the need for stronger regulatory bodies to protect the environment. (Muskie's campaign was later sabotaged by Richard Nixon as a target in what later became the Watergate scandal.) Meanwhile, calls for strong financial regulations can be traced all the way back to the Progressive Era.

Related

"Power grab": Supreme Court guts agency power, posing "devastating" environmental risks

"Bureaucracies are designed to manage complex tasks through standardized procedures, which can indeed lead to slower decision-making processes," Sounman Hong, a distinguished professor in public policy and management at Yonsei University, told Salon. "However, this very structure also ensures consistency, accountability and fairness, which are crucial in democratic governance."

In short, bureaucracies are a tool, neither inherently good or evil but only as effective and virtuous as the bureaucrats who run them — and, of course, the politicians who operate over the bureaucrats.

Although bureaucracies implement regulations and procedures that some may find restrictive, "these rules are often in place to protect public interest, ensure equity, and prevent abuses of power," Hong said. "The challenge lies in balancing these controls with the need for flexibility and responsiveness."

When bureaucracies fail, it is often because the people who staff them become resistant to change and therefore rely on out-of-date knowledge.

"Effective bureaucracies are those that continuously adapt to new information, technologies and societal needs," Hong said. "The perception that bureaucracies are slow to change often overlooks the many instances where they have been at the forefront of adopting innovative practices."

We need your help to stay independent

Subscribe today to support Salon's progressive journalism

Indeed, when bureaucracies do not innovate, it is often not because they are structurally unsound, but rather because they are held back by politicians who have their own agendas.

"Bureaucracies respond most and best to crises: when the system they manage cannot proceed as normal, confronts a problem it was not prepared for, and — perhaps most importantly — finds itself under intense criticism from the public it ostensibly serves," Richard D. Wolff, an economist emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Salon. "Repression of social problems by governments allow bureaucracies to rot and become sclerotic as the social pressure builds to the point where bureaucracies are exploded."

Wolff added that often the most nefarious bureaucracies are the ones controlled by private entities like corporations rather than governments. For all of the boilerplate conservative denunciations of bureaucratic structures, capitalists observed their effectiveness in government structures and therefore applied them to their private businesses.

"Bureaucracy was once applied to government alone," Wolff said. "Capitalist enterprises were then relatively small and many in number; their regulating institution could be and was the market. That time is long past — except in the minds of apologetic ideologues. Nowadays, and for many decades, the dominant form of capitalist enterprise is the corporation and its dominant size is large. In short, corporations have had to develop bureaucracies to manage their affairs alongside governments."

Wolff described capitalism in the modern era as "a kind of revolving door between corporate and government leaders moving easily between the similar bureaucracies they manage on either side of those doors. Indeed, the two bureaucracies have become ever more similar because they borrow so much from one another, alongside the CEOs they borrow."

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes.

"A great deal of the anti-bureaucracy sentiment is associated with right-wing populism which often sputters between anarchism and fascism (turning all agencies into the playthings of a right-wing dictator)."

Bert A. Rockman, professor emeritus of political science at Purdue University, told Salon that the questions about bureaucracies remind him of the sociologist Max Weber, who argued that "the most proficient means of organizing is with a professional class of operatives with expertise in the relevant subject matter." (Perhaps that's why Weber is known as the "father" of the bureaucratic organization theory.)

"That's true in business; it's also true in government," Rockman explained. "We've seen earlier experiments to eliminate bureaucracy that typically ended in anarchy."

Rockman pointed out that modern conservative complaints about bureaucracies even ignore how American founding fathers like Alexander Hamilton advocated "the development of an institutionalized governmental apparatus."

"A great deal of the anti-bureaucracy sentiment is associated with right-wing populism which often sputters between anarchism and fascism (turning all agencies into the playthings of a right-wing dictator)," Rockman noted.

The Supreme Court has recently drawn outrage over rulings limiting bureaucracies. In June, it overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine — i.e., the 1984 ruling Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council –  which required lower courts to defer to experts in federal bureaucracies on how to interpret the law as long as the bureaucrats' reading was reasonable. The Chevron doctrine simultaneously helped create consistent policy implementation throughout the United States and restrained potentially partisan and activist judges from overturning expert-crafted policy for political reasons.

Gautham Rao, a professor of legal history at American University, told Salon that the recent Chevron decision had similar "historic implications" as the January 6 insurrection, at least in the sense that it is an attack "on what we call the administrative state," referring to people who have worked in government for their entire careers, learning how to best serve the citizens with whom they interact and developing invaluable stores of firsthand knowledge.

"Things like scientific matters pertaining to clean air and clean water, as one example, or complicated matters pertaining to labor relations between employer and employee," Rao said, are generally best figured out by scientific and/or legal authorities. By empowering politicians to ignore experts, the Supreme Court puts the public welfare at risk.

"Let's just say, for example, a court majority doesn't believe in climate change, they can essentially take down all manner of regulation on environmental matters, as an example," Rao said. He added that the court, rather than relying on historical precedent to reach its decision in these cases, can fabricate its own alternative facts.

"The Supreme Court's now very specious reliance [is] its version of history, and rendering the founders of the United States into versions of what they want but in reality not what the founders actually were," Rao said. "This is now a continuation with the Dobbs decision and others, where the court has looked to history and essentially created its own history that it finds very convenient to use as justification for undoing major governmental policies and traditions over the 20th Century."

If someone genuinely wishes to reform bureaucracies — as opposed to simply disempower them for the sake of enabling one political party's agenda to win over another's — the best way to do so is make sure they remain reflective of the people they are supposed to serve. According to Hong, this requires that bureaucracies operate as close to the ground as possible, particularly through local government agencies or other community-based organizations.

"These entities often have a more direct understanding of the needs and concerns of the populations they serve, allowing them to respond more effectively," Hong said. "Conversely, large, centralized bureaucracies may be less responsive to immediate public needs due to their scale and complexity. The multiple layers of hierarchy can slow down decision-making processes, making it more challenging to address local concerns quickly."

Related

If we can't fix this "frightening" problem, then we have "no hope" of addressing the climate crisis

Hong added, "According to my research on bureaucracy, however, it is important to recognize that the responsiveness of local bureaucracies may come at the cost of efficiency and long-term outcomes. This is especially true when electoral accountability is the primary driver of responsiveness."

He added that electoral accountability can be a "double-edged sword," since they can unintentionally encourage short-term thinking.

"Politicians and bureaucrats in local governments may prioritize policies that yield visible benefits before the next election, sometimes at the expense of longer-term investments that would benefit the public in the future," Hong said. By contrast, "central bureaucracies may be better suited to prioritize long-term outcomes, which can be advantageous for policies requiring sustained efforts or where the outcomes are less observable to the public. This management-driven approach can lead to greater effectiveness in areas that require long-term planning and investment, although it may also result in a disconnect from the immediate preferences of the public."

Wolff also encouraged social critics to not be hoodwinked by "simple-minded arguments" that attempt to turn people off from all left-wing politics through generic vilification of bureaucrats.

"Defenders of capitalism have crafted ideological arguments designed especially to block [and] thwart socialism," Wolff said. "Such ideological projects conceive socialism as a movement aimed at expanding the role of government as a controller and regulator of capitalist economies. To prevent that, the ideologues have reified ideology, made it something to be analyzed in and by itself as if 'its' consequences were not over-determined by everything else in society that bureaucracies interact with and are shaped by. Bureaucracy is thus bad, enabling the argument to be extended to socialism because its governmental focus entails 'more' bureaucracy than the smaller government focus of capitalism's defenders."

Wolff added, "It is a simple-minded argument based on the false premise that the comparably large bureaucracies of mega-corporations and governments either do not exist or do not matter."

Read more

about climate change

Bat deaths linked to rise in infant deaths thanks to pesticide overuse

In yet another example of the cascading effects of mass extinction and pesticide overuse, the decline of bats has been linked to a sharp rise in infant deaths.

Over the last two decades, North American bats have been devastated by a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome that has massacred millions of the flying mammals. It infects their skin and causes them to awaken from their winter hibernation early, often either freezing or starving to death. The invasive fungi responsible, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, truly lives up to the “destruction” part of its name. But the collapse of bat populations isn’t just harming nature — it’s hurting people, too.

Related

Scientists beg Etsy sellers to stop selling dead bats as ornaments

Bats eat a lot of bugs, especially disease-carrying mosquitoes and other insects humans tend to hate. But less bats means that more pesticides are used to replace the natural function that has been lost. A new study in the journal Science tracked how bat declines were linked with an increase of pesticide use of more than 30 percent on average, which is alarming enough on its face given the numerous ill health effects linked to pesticides.

But the researcher, Eyal G. Frank, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, went one step further and also examined the infant mortality rates due to internal causes of death (excluding homicides and accidents), finding that the death toll rose approximately 8 percent. Importantly, counties that didn’t see a decline in bat populations or an increase in pesticide use did not experience an increase in infant deaths.

“This result highlights that real-world use levels of insecticides have a detrimental impact on health, even when used within regulatory limits, which highlights the difficulties of assessing the public health impacts of pesticides when regulating them individually,” Frank wrote.

Of course, correlation is not causation. Just because infant deaths went up as pesticide use did does not necessarily mean that the two phenomena are connected. But it’s important to note that the increase of infant deaths went up at the same rate as the increase in pesticides, as well as the increased spread of P. destructans. In other words, this ratio is pretty hard to ignore.

“The staggered expansion of the wildlife disease supports the causal interpretation of the results,” Frank wrote. “Any additional alternative explanation would need to change along the expansion path of the wildlife disease around the same timing of its expansion.”

Overall, the research is yet another indicator that humans are intricately woven into the web of life, similar to how another recent study found the decline of vultures spread enough disease to kill half a million people. We are not separate from the ongoing mass extinctions all around us.

And it will only get worse, as Frank and other biologists have argued about a "biological holocaust," unless we take action to protect wildlife, including bats. As Frank puts it, “conserving bats can be beneficial for society. Additional funding for wildlife population monitoring and evaluating mitigation strategies for the adverse effects detailed above could greatly contribute to stabilizing and recovering bat population levels.”

Read more

about conservation

JD Vance says school shootings are a “fact of life”

Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance said that school shootings were simply a “fact of life” after a shooting at a Georgia high school left four dead — the 45th school shooting in the United States so far this year.

The comments, made at an Arizona rally on Thursday, come after Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz called for enhanced gun control measures in their own campaign rallies following the shooting.

“If these psychos are going to go after our kids we’ve got to be prepared for it,” Vance said, bucking a question asked on gun control measures and instead championing efforts to spend more on school security, per the Associated Press. “We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality we live in. We’ve got to deal with it.”

Vance, who noted that the event was an “awful tragedy,” faced criticism in June for calling gun violence in schools a “fake problem” and called an attempt to ban bump stocks, used in the Las Vegas shooting that killed 60, a “huge distraction.”

“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said at the Thursday rally. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children they’re not able.”

At Apalachee High School, where a student killed four and injured nine more, a school resource officer was on site, and though they quickly stopped the shooter, they were unable to prevent those gun-inflicted deaths and injuries. 

Vance’s comments drew strong condemnation from Fred Guttenberg, a gun control activist whose daughter was killed in a 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

"School shootings are a fact of life? My daughter Jaime's murder was a fact of life? I can't wait to make your exit from having any say in our public safety a fact of life. I can't wait to vote for @KamalaHarris and @Tim_Walz," Guttenberg wrote in a post to X.

Former President Donald Trump, who in January told supporters after an Iowa school shooting that “we have to get over it,” has not announced official policies on gun control, though his campaign manager Chris LaCivita told conference-goers at a concealed carry event during the Republican National Convention that Trump would continue to oppose gun control efforts.

Father of Georgia school shooter faces charges for allowing his son access to a gun

The father of 14-year-old suspected mass shooter Colt Gray told investigators that he purchased the firearm used to kill at least four and injure nine more as a Christmas gift for his son in December 2023, a CNN report alleges.

Per the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, 59-year-old Colin Gray was charged in connection to the Apalachee High School killing spree, with a source telling CNN that the weapon was purchased at a local gun store after law enforcement raised red flags.

Colin Gray, charged on Thursday night with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, was interviewed by local law enforcement in May 2023 when the FBI found threats to commit a school shooting made by the younger Gray online.

That investigation ended when the threat couldn’t be substantiated.

“These charges stem from Mr. Gray knowingly allowing his son Colt to possess a weapon,” GBI Director Chris Hosey reportedly said.

Colin Gray reportedly told the local sheriff’s department then that his son didn’t have unsupervised access to the guns he kept in the house, before later purchasing his son the weapon.

Colt Gray, charged with four counts of murder on Thursday, was in the midst of his first full day of school at Apalachee High School when he shot 13 students before surrendering to a school resource officer.

Of the deceased, two were students at the school — Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo — alongside two teachers, Christina Irimie and Richard Aspinwall.

Former Trump campaign adviser charged with working for sanctioned Russian media

Former Trump adviser Dimitri Simes was charged on Thursday for work conducted on behalf of sanctioned Russian state TV company Channel One, and for accepting and laundering more than $1 million in compensation, the Department of Justice said.

Other compensation included a personal car and driver, a stipend for an apartment in Moscow and a team of employees, a statement from the DOJ alleges.

“These defendants allegedly violated sanctions that were put in place in response to Russia’s illegal aggression in Ukraine,” U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves said in a statement, per the Associated Press. “Such violations harm our national security interests — a fact that Dimitri Simes, with the deep experience he gained in national affairs after fleeing the Soviet Union and becoming a U.S. citizen, should have uniquely appreciated.”

The company was sanctioned in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and violations of those sanctions — with which Dimitri and his wife Anastasia Simes are charged with three each — carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison per count.

Simes, who worked with the Trump campaign in 2016 to organize foreign policy speeches via his think tank, the Center for the National Interest, was also heavily featured as a person of interest in Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Per Mueller’s report, Simes advised Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner on potential talking points on Russia for the then-candidate and passed information about Bill Clinton which was shared with other campaign officials, per the Associated Press.

According to the DOJ, Anastasia Simes was additionally charged for working with sanctioned oligarch Aleksandr Yevgenyevich Udodov, violating the sanctions by purchasing art on Udodov’s behalf. The DOJ added that the pair hadn't been arrested and were likely out of the country.

The charges came amid a slew of DOJ indictments this week against Americans working alongside Russians to promote the interests of the country illegally as it continues to wage its invasion against Ukraine, including an indictment involving an American conservative media group that took $10 million from Russia Today.

In a surprise move, Hunter Biden pleads guilty in California tax case

Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, took responsibility for tax dodging charges in a California court, avoiding a second criminal trial.

Biden pleaded guilty on Thursday to the nine tax-related charges, three felonies and six misdemeanors, brought by special counsel David Weiss after prosecutors and Trump-appointed Judge Mark Scarsi fought back on an Alford plea, which would have allowed Biden to avoid admitting guilt for charges while accepting a guilty verdict.

"Mr. Biden is prepared to proceed today and finish this," Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell said Thursday afternoon in court, per ABC News.

Per the 56-page indictment, Biden evaded taxes and submitted false information in a 2018 filing, amounting to a $1.4 million sum in unpaid taxes between 2016 and 2020, which he paid back along with penalties — information the jury wouldn’t have been allowed to hear.

Biden had already agreed to plea guilty to misdemeanor tax charges before Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika torpedoed the deal last year.

Prosecutor Leo Wise reportedly called the Alford plea evidence that Biden sought special treatment, while others have argued that his prosecution itself is evidence that Biden is being held to a higher standard than private citizens.

A juror in a Delaware case, in which Biden was found guilty of gun ownership charges related to his drug use — also conducted by special counsel Weiss — called the prosecution “a waste of taxpayer dollars,” with another juror adding that the case appeared to be “as much to embarrass as it was to convict.”

“The View” hosts take issue with “Dancing with the Stars” casting fraudster Anna Delvey

Whoopi Goldberg and her cohosts on "The View" called out the apparent immigration double standard in celebrity grifter Anna Delvey’s casting on “Dancing with the Stars,” despite her pending legal case.

Goldberg called specific attention to the treatment of other immigrants accused of crimes and questioned Delvey’s special treatment, as she’s set to appear alongside Olympian Ilona Maher, NBA star Dwight Howard, and "90210" actress Tori Spelling

“I think back to all the families who’ve had family members arrested by ICE who have gone to the courts to get their dad or their brother or their mother back,” Goldberg said on a Thursday episode of the show. “This woman, they gave her permission to go do this.”

Delvey, who was announced on Wednesday as part of the 33rd season of "DWTS" and spotted sporting an ankle monitor in promotional images, previously said she “got permission from ICE” to do the show, a green light that didn’t sit well with Goldberg.

“Is there a two-tiered system here with ICE?” Goldberg asked.

Alyssa Farah Griffin went on to note that she isn’t as worried about Delvey’s pending case or criminal history of defrauding New York’s elite, but rather her failure to express remorse for her schemes.

“Martha Stewart, she did jail time. I am here to see Martha Stewart thrive. Even Gypsy Rose, I put her into that category because she did the time and acknowledged wrongdoing for what she did. I’m not convinced that this person [Delvey] has,” Griffin said.

The stars were seemingly unconvinced that Delvey could be rehabilitated.

“She defrauded so many people and then spent about two years in prison, and then had to spend another 18 months in prison for overstaying her welcome and overstaying her visa,” Sunny Hostin added. “And what is the, I don’t know, consequence of it? A bejeweled ankle monitor. A federal bejeweled ankle monitor and a spot on a television show.”

“DWTS,” which airs on ABC, the same network as “The View,” has previously featured controversial contestants, including former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Watch here:

Trump plans to hire Elon Musk to lead “government efficiency commission”

At an economics conference on Thursday, former president Donald Trump unveiled plans to bring Elon Musk in for a job in his administration, giving billionaires another voice via the Tesla CEO, who is a vocal critic of corporate regulation and a warrior against labor protections.

Trump, who previously mulled bringing Musk on, reportedly received a $45 million-per-month campaign lifeline through his America PAC, which was also accused of misleading swing state voters last month.

“I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government — making recommendations for drastic reforms,” Trump said in remarks at the Economic Club of New York, echoing earlier comments that he’d hope Musk could lead such a department.

Trump added that the post came “at the suggestion of Elon Musk, who has given me his complete and total endorsement.”

Musk, who has leveraged his various companies to advantage the former president, suppressing anti-Trump and pro-Kamala Harris content on his X platform, is also largely reliant on good relations with the federal government to keep his businesses afloat.

Per Quartz, the rocket contractor had scooped up at least $15.3 billion in government contracts by April of last year, a figure that’s only grown. 

During the conference, Trump also laid out an economic agenda for his potential next term a week ahead of a debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, and hours after a damning report from Goldman Sachs indicated he’d be worse for the economy than Harris.

Ugandan runner’s death highlights “a larger, disturbing pattern of violence” against female athletes

Olympian and long-distance runner Rebecca Cheptegei died Thursday after sustaining mortal burn wounds to 80% of her body in a gasoline attack last weekend. She was 33.

Dr. Owen Menach, who is on staff at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in the city of Eldoret, confirmed Cheptegei's death via multiple organ failure to the New York Times.  In addition to kidney failure, which the Times reported set in at the time of Cheptegei's initial hospitalization, she also sustained inhalation burns. 

Kenyan police reported that Cheptegei, a Ugandan athlete who finished in 44th place in the women's marathon at the Paris Olympics in August, was doused in gasoline and set on fire by her boyfriend, Dickson Ndiema, on Sunday afternoon. Authorities also noted that the couple had been embroiled in an argument over an unknown matter before the attack took place. Cheptegei's father, Joseph Cheptegei, told reporters the dispute had stemmed from a property disagreement, per NBC.

Related

Running in fear: Laken Riley's murder echoes the perils of female runners everywhere

Cheptegei lived in an area of Kenya known for being well-suited to high-altitude training, as noted by The Associated Press. She earned a spot competing at Paris, her first Olympic Games, after completing the Abu Dhabi Marathon in 2 hours and 22 minutes in 2022, a Ugandan record. The runner also earned a 14th place finish in the marathon event at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest. According to World Athletics, Cheptegei's "most notable achievement was her victory in the up and downhill race at the World Mountain and Trail Running Championships in 2022."

"World Athletics is shocked and deeply saddened to learn that Ugandan distance runner Rebecca Cheptegei died tragically on Thursday (5 September) as a result of an alleged domestic abuse attack," the organization said in a statement.

“Our sport has lost a talented athlete in the most tragic and unthinkable circumstances,” said World Athletics President Sebastian Coe. “Rebecca was an incredibly versatile runner who still had lots left to give on the roads, mountains and cross country trails.

“I have been in touch with our Council Members in Africa to see how we can help not only in our capacity as governing body of the sport Rebecca competed in, but to assess how our safeguarding policies might be enhanced to include abuse outside of the sport, and bringing together stakeholders from all areas of athletics to combine forces to protect our female athletes to the best of our abilities from abuse of all kinds.”

Donald Rukare, the president of the Uganda Olympic Committee, wrote on X/Twitter that the attack was a "cowardly and senseless act that has led to the loss of a great athlete."

Cheptegei's killing is the latest in a series of domestic-violence-related deaths of female runners in the region, compounding a shocking uptick in instances of femicide in Kenya and other African countries. In 2021, 25-year-old Agnes Jebet Tirop, a top-tier Kenyan marathoner and Olympian at the Tokyo Games was stabbed to death at her home in Iten. A month before her death, Tirop had set a world record in a 10-kilometer road race. Her husband was subsequently charged in the slaying, and his court case remains ongoing. Less than a year after Tirop's killing, Kenyan-born Damaris Muthee Mutua — who competed for Bahrain — was found dead in her home after being strangled. Per the AP, a male runner from Ethiopia with whom she was in a relationship was charged with murder. 

Njeri wa Migwi, executive director of Usikimye, a Kenyan nonprofit supporting victims of gender-based violence told The Times that Cheptegei's tragic death is "part of a larger, disturbing pattern of violence against women, including high-profile female athletes."

“It’s genuinely a huge alarm,” Zaha Indimuli, an organizer for End Femicide Kenya, told the outlet. “We are all scared.”

“I can’t even explain the horror of what she might have gone through,” Ms. Indimuli said, adding that the killing of a high-ranking athlete gave her the sense that no woman was safe. “Women are constant walking targets for perpetrators,”

Read more

about this topic

 

Trump repeats debunked Venezuelan gang conspiracy: “They had AK-47s, the ultimate guns”

In a speech scheduled to tackle economic issues on Thursday, former president Donald Trump echoed a conspiracy theory debunked by law enforcement, claiming that a Venezuelan gang had taken control of a “large section” of Colorado.

Speaking before a crowd at the Economic Club of New York in an event at which he promised to extend tax cuts on the ultra-wealthy and massive tariffs on consumer goods, Trump repeated the conspiracy theory that Aurora police debunked.

“You saw in Colorado this week, a group from Venezuela . . . rough ones, rough ones . . . they took over large sections of a town, large sections of an area of Colorado,” the former president said. “Aurora, has anyone been there? I think you’d better stay away for a while.”

Trump added, a day after a school shooting left 4 dead, that tenants in an apartment building — which far-right figures have attempted to tie to Venezuelan gangs — “had AK-47s. The ultimate guns. AK-47s. They can blow lots of people away real fast.”

The comments came as Trump claimed “illegal aliens” were driving up housing costs across the United States, an allegation that has become a core argument for his plan to deport tens of millions of immigrants within the U.S.

“The sheriff didn't want to touch them, nobody wants to touch them. The sheriff — ‘There’s 18 Venezuelans attacking my building, would you please come over and straighten out the situation?' — You know what they say? ‘Uhh, well, no thanks. Let’s call in the military.’ They’re taking over.”

Trump, who on Wednesday seemingly momentarily forgot that President Joe Biden had dropped out of the race, has opted for multiple speeches to donors and interest groups, opting for fewer public campaign speeches this week.

FBI raids homes of NYC mayor’s top deputies amid growing legal probes

The FBI raided the homes of two high-ranking officials inside New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ administration on Wednesday, another episode in the legal saga surrounding Adams and his administration.

Per ABC News, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright — engaged to NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks — and Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks had their homes raided as part of an ongoing investigation.

“Investigators have not indicated to us the mayor or his staff are targets of any investigation,” Lisa Zornberg, a lawyer for Adams, said in a statement to ABC News. “As a former member of law enforcement, the mayor has repeatedly made clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”

While no arrests have been made, the FBI reportedly seized evidence from the two, including electronic devices. It is unclear what investigation the raids were a part of, with a source telling ABC News that they were unrelated to an ongoing investigation into whether Adams took bribes from the Turkish government.

The action also comes just days after Linda Sun, a top aide to New York State governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul, was arrested for working to advance the interests of the Chinese government.

Last November, the FBI seized the Mayor’s personal cell phone, stemming from an investigation into his 2021 mayoral run.

In February, other high-ranking Adams aide’s homes were raided, along with campaign offices located within a shopping mall in connection to a suspected “straw donation” scheme.

Harris campaign says it raised over $300 million in August, more than twice Trump’s haul

Sources close to Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign told NBC News that she raised over $300 million in the month of August, more than twice as much as former President Donald Trump's haul, an indication that the enthusiasm around her candidacy and the flood of fundraising cash shows little sign of abating.

Harris has been raking in huge amounts of money after President Joe Biden dropped out on July 21 and endorsed her as his successor. After the Democratic National Convention, Harris campaign officials announced that they had raised $540 million since she joined the race. The exact amount of money raised in August should be revealed in the next campaign finance disclosure, which is due Sept. 20.

A Los Angeles Times analysis of the last finance disclosure on August 20, almost exactly a month into Harris' fledgling candidacy, found that about 70% of her donors, about 1.5 million people, did not previously donate to Biden's campaign, underscoring Harris' ability to reach new voters.

All that cash will give Harris a boost in a fall election firefight across the battleground states. Some Democrats, however, are worried that Harris' money flood is overshadowing tepid fundraising by down-ballot candidates and committees focused on state legislative races, and it's unclear how long her coattails are.

Trump's campaign reported that it and related entities raised $130 million in August, with 98% of the money coming from small donors who contribute less than $200.

“These fundraising numbers from August are a reflection of that movement and will propel President Trump’s America First movement back to the White House so we can undo the terrible failures of Harris and Biden,” Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes told NBC. The numbers reported by either Trump or Harris' campaign don't account for Super PACs, which unlike candidates can accept unlimited cash donations from the nation's wealthiest donors.

Judge Chutkan unmoved by election calendar in Trump’s Jan. 6 case

Judge Tanya Chutkan, overseeing a case against former President Donald Trump for his role on Jan. 6, said that Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling calling special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment illegitimate was not “particularly persuasive,” and signaled the case may move forward despite the election schedule.

Chutkan on Thursday re-arraigned Trump on a new superseding indictment from Smith’s office, made to exclude potentially official acts he made as president involving the attacks following the Supreme Court’s wide presidential immunity decision.

Responding to Trump attorney John Lauro’s suggestion that allowing prosecutors to file a brief containing evidence would put harmful details into the public record "at this very sensitive time,” Chutkan said the law was not concerned with political sensitivities.

“The electoral process and the timing of the election and what needs to happen before  . . . is not relevant here. This court is not concerned with the electoral schedule,” Chutkan said, per Politico reporter Kyle Cheney.

Chutkan went on to ask Trump’s attorneys why they were filing a motion to challenge the legitimacy of Smith’s appointment, citing Clarence Thomas’ dissent in Trump v. United States and Judge Cannon’s ruling, tossing out a case involving Trump’s illegal handling of classified documents. The judge noted that they missed an October deadline to file and that D.C. Circuit precedent held Smith’s appointment was valid.

“You have an opinion by a district judge in another circuit which frankly this court doesn't find persuasive,” Chutkan reportedly said, per Lawfare’s Roger Parloff.

Chutkan, who also disagreed with Lauro’s characterization that the Supreme Court’s ruling already settled whether conversations between Trump and Pence were official acts, according to MSNBC correspondent Katie Phang, didn’t dismiss the conversation outright, noting that if Trump’s team could persuade the court that the D.C. Circuit precedent didn’t hold, she’d reconsider.

At one point in the hearing, Lauro cracked a joke that “life was almost meaningless” while the case was on hold for months. To which Chutkan fired back, "Enjoy it while it lasts."

Progressive New Orleans DA wants to address “sins of the past.” Republicans are trying to stop him

Republican state lawmakers in Louisiana have launched an investigation into the New Orleans district attorney over concerns that he's abusing his power by making use of criminal justice reform policies intended to address prosecutorial and police misconduct. But legal experts warn that the pushback against the D.A. threatens to undermine the results of those efforts. 

Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams, a Democrat whose office serves the blue city-parish of the otherwise red state, has focused his work since being elected in 2020 on addressing what he terms "sins of the past" in the city's history of prosecutorial and police misconduct as the state grapples with high incarceration rates, according to the Associated Press. Conservative officials and legislators, however, have raised concerns that Williams' work amounts to arbitrarily allowing people convicted of violent crimes to reenter the public amid comparatively high homicide rates. 

Williams is one of more than 50 progressive prosecutors who have sought to reduce incarceration rates over the last decade and reexamine cases for potential constitutional violations or excessive sentences. He's also one of a handful who have received considerable blowback over their approaches to reforming the criminal legal system in their districts and counties. Criminal law experts argue that such pushback against elected prosecutors' criminal justice reform efforts threaten to strip the voters who elected them of their voice while steamrolling those attorneys' efforts to remedy past harms.

Related

"Remarkable": Despite GOP fear-mongering, experts say new crime data shows US "safest" in decades

Maybell Romero, a professor of law at Tulane University in New Orleans, told Salon that she views this heightened scrutiny as a largely "political pushback" against district attorneys who challenge the "hard on crime, very pro-police officer, very pro- 'Let's convict as much as we can and as many people as we can, and never shall we reconsider whether this was fair or not'" approach to prosecution. Looking at the breakdown nationwide, she argued, "it's mostly Democratic, elected district attorneys who are getting this pushback from largely right-leaning Republican legislatures."

"What you see here is really potentially very dangerous in that [the] electorate in counties who want to see this kind of work happening end up having their votes — they end up having their voices — completely silenced by people who don't even live here because they insist on trying to figure out how to control these progressive prosecutors and reformist prosecutors for all manner of political reasons, which have nothing to do with safety, they have nothing to do with justice, they have nothing to do with ethical conduct, and those are the things that people are concerned about here," she added.

Williams' office over the last three years voided convictions or reduced sentences in several hundred cases through post-conviction relief, a process that allows the court to examine new evidence after other efforts to appeal have failed. The office's civil rights division's review of old cases has led to a number of exonerations and plea-deal releases hinged on legal practices it finds unjust or unconstitutional.

"Counties who want to see this kind of work happening end up having their votes — they end up having their voices — completely silenced by people who don't even live here."

He has placed particular focus on reviewing non-unanimous jury convictions, which a 2020 Supreme Court ruling had declared unconstitutional. While that ruling did not automatically apply to convictions prior to it, Williams has not prevented people convicted before 2020 by non-unanimous juries from applying for post-conviction relief on these grounds.

Conservative lawmakers, according to the AP, have voiced concern that Williams' office isn't being transparent about its actions. Attorney General Liz Murrill told the outlet that she is taking a "close look" at the cases and argued against convictions being amended "simply because the district attorney has a difference of opinion" from the courts and the state Legislature.

That pushback has, in part, arisen from a social media campaign spearheaded by advocacy group Bayou Mama Bears, which is led by former prosecutor Laura Rodrigue, the daughter of the previous district attorney. In a series of posts, the group claims that Williams' work threatens public safety and highlights instances where his office resentenced or released people convicted of violent crimes. 

Romero, who previously served as a county prosecutor in Utah, said that the notion that Williams is arbitrarily releasing people convicted of violent crimes falls on a "presumption of guilt" that ignores the legal process that grants someone convicted of a crime post-conviction relief. In these instances, prosecutors and courts have found new evidence that indicate the circumstances under which someone was convicted or the facts once used to prove their guilt "might not actually have been factual at all" or that the person, perhaps, "shouldn't have been convicted at all."  

"It's not like people are getting released en masse just when they ask for it, and nothing happens, and no one's deliberating over this," she said. "The vast majority, if not virtually all, of these post-conviction relief efforts start with motions by defense counsel, and they end up relying on different legal arguments, and they have to be able to show that there's new evidence that might be really relevant that wasn't considered."

Critics of post-conviction relief also note that Williams' predecessors engaged the process sparingly. Will Snowden, a professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans, argued, however, that that point is "a faulty comparison" given that Williams ran for office "on a platform largely critical of his predecessors and their misuse of their discretion." 

We need your help to stay independent

Subscribe today to support Salon's progressive journalism

Williams, he said, is engaging post-conviction relief on the backdrop of Louisiana's history of non-unanimous jury verdicts, which allowed jurors to split 10-2 on a vote to convict a defendant. According to the Innocence Project New Orleans, that policy arose in 1898 during the post-Reconstruction era as an effort to limit the political power of Black Americans by diluting their dissent on juries. 

Snowden also noted the role played by the state's habitual offender statute, which allows individuals charged with nonviolent and violent offenses to receive "an exasperated sentence based on prior felony conviction," such as a life sentence for drug possession as a former client of his faced when he was a public defender. 

"That practice of using the habitual offenders statute in that manner was a practice of DA Williams' predecessors, and people are aware of that," Snowden told Salon. "So I think he is reevaluating some of those decisions, some of those indications of the habitual offender statute, to right some of those wrongs because he does not agree with those policies of incarcerating people for decades at a time for simple possession or substance use crimes." 

The state Senate Judiciary C Committee, with support from Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, earlier this month announced it would hold an oversight hearing on the post-conviction relief employed by the district attorney's office. Williams has agreed to testify before the committee during the meeting, slated for Thursday.

Williams has also denied accusations of misconduct and defended his office's use of post-conviction relief, arguing instead that he is following through on his campaign processes. 

“This is not just waking up and saying, ‘Hey, let’s try something new,” Williams said, per the AP. “This is listening to the community and answering and trying to deliver.”

The Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office and the Louisiana Senate Judiciary C Committee did not respond to emailed requests for comment. 

Romero said that, historically, prosecutors nationwide have enjoyed a "very wide latitude" to decide their caseloads and "a great amount of discretion" to determine whether to move forward with cases, pursue charges and offer plea deals — a broad discretion that has also largely "gone unquestioned."

"It's mostly Democratic, elected district attorneys who are getting this pushback from largely right-leaning Republican legislatures."

While prosecutors past have used that discretion to "overcharge" or "follow tough-on-crime agendas," she said, "what you see now is that we have this new generation of prosecutors who are bringing in new agendas and new perspectives with regard to fundamental fairness, with regard to exactly what a prosecutor should be doing and what makes for a good prosecutor."

Those heavily scrutinized prosecutors — which she said include Williams, ousted ex-San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Cook County, Ill. State Attorney Kim Foxx — Romero explained, would review cases to see if there were any instances of overcharging, new evidence or new alibi witnesses that could possibly exonerate someone or lead to their sentence being reduced. 

A new law passed by the Republican-dominated legislature earlier this year that took effect last month effectively barred Williams from engaging in post-conviction relief without approval from the attorney general. State lawmakers, however, had passed a law in 2021 that did grant district attorneys authority to amend sentences, even in cases without clear errors, through post-conviction relief approved by judges.

After holding a special session on crime earlier this year, the state legislature has also enacted a slate of other new laws addressing the criminal legal system, including those that expanded death penalty execution methods and eliminated discretionary parole. 

As of late May, Williams' office reported voiding more than 140 convictions and reducing sentences in at least 180 cases, which often took the form of re-sentencing those convicted to lesser charges, since 2021, according to the AP.

Those numbers, however, don't amount to much in the grand scheme, given the rate at which Louisiana "incarcerates and prosecutes and entangles people in the criminal legal system left and right every day," Romero said. 

Louisiana has one of the highest incarceration rates in the nation, with 1,067 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents, according to a recent Prison Policy Initiative report. The violent crime rate in New Orleans, however, has seen a dramatic decline in recent years.

Snowden argued that the pushback against Williams' work around post-conviction relief does a disservice to the D.A.'s efforts to redress past misconduct in the forms of "invalid and and unconstitutional verdicts," remedy "outsized sentences that were not necessarily the most appropriate for the case" and recognize that addressing contributors to crime "doesn't have to solely rely on incarceration."

"I often describe the criminal legal system as the catch basin for the failures of the other systems. So when our education systems fail, or when our access to housing fails, or when our access to jobs fail, those systems' failures can direct more people to have contact with the criminal legal system," Snowden said. "And I think D.A. Williams is aware of that relationship. And so not only is he laser-focused on prosecuting people for committing violent crimes, but he's also aware that there needs to be more advocacy and investment at the front end of the system to prevent people from coming to his office in the first place."

Read more

about criminal justice

A “fuss-free dinner solution” or “cat food”? Heinz’s new carbonara in a can stirs up a heated debate

Heinz is no stranger when it comes to releasing wacky pasta meals. Earlier this year, the famed multinational food company partnered with Absolut Vodka to launch a limited-edition pasta sauce in the UK. Heinz is also behind the Alphagetti and Zoodles canned pasta along with several pop culture-inspired meals. But, in what can be called a surprising twist, its latest offering has been declared too outlandish by several ardent critics.    

Heinz recently introduced Spaghetti Carbonara in a can, its first pasta release in a decade. Described as #NoDramaCarbonara, Heinz’s tinned rendition is “an easy, quick (and tasty) carbonara recipe that’s fail-proof, taking all the fuss out of cooking, allowing pasta lovers to nail it every single time,” per the product’s description. The pasta itself is nowhere near the same quality as fresh, homemade carbonara. Heinz’s version swaps eggs and pecorino cheese for a laundry list of chemical preservatives that mimic the original flavors, including maltodextrin and stabilizers. 

The Spaghetti Carbonara in a can was a major topic of conversation on BBC Radio 4’s Today program, in which presenter Jonny Dymond asked whether the canned pasta signals the “end of culinary civilization” or is a “leap forward that brought us the joy of Pot Noodles and microwave meals.” Amongst Italians, the overwhelming sentiment seems to be the former.

Chef Alessandro Pipero, who runs the Michelin-starred restaurant Pipero in Rome and has been dubbed the “carbonara king,” was not amused by Heinz’s Spaghetti Carbonara in a can. “Do you mean in a tin, like cat food?” he asked while speaking with The Guardian.

Related

The indulgent joy of (very late night) cooking

“I don’t really know how to respond to this, shouldn’t we stick to putting things like Coca-Cola in a can?” Pipero also told the Times. In a later interview on CBC Radio, the chef admitted that the concept is both “genius” and “industrious,” but said he refuses to try the pasta for himself.

“I have no problem with Heinz,” Pipero said. “Maybe I have a problem with people that buy the carbonara from Heinz and say, 'Good,' then they buy it again.” He also mentioned that he plans to sell his own carbonara sauce, made from fresh and whole ingredients, in Italian supermarkets soon.

Ciara Tassoni, who manages the Italian restaurant Bottega Prelibato in London, was less forgiving than Pipero when asked about canned carbonara.

“It's a disgrace and it couldn't be any further from authentic carbonara,” she told The Sun. “If somebody came in here and asked for a can of carbonara they would immediately be thrown out.”

On the other hand, folks over on Reddit — namely, the r/iamveryculinary subreddit — were amused by Heinz’s Spaghetti Carbonara in a can and reveled in the disappointments of online Italians. 

Want more great food writing and recipes? Subscribe to Salon Food's newsletter, The Bite.

“This has left the Italian healthcare system on the verge of collapse due to a shortage of IV limoncello,” one user commented under a post sharing an article titled, “Italians revolted as Heinz unveils spaghetti carbonara in a can.” Similarly, another user wrote, “The website links to a story of Gordon Ramsay receiving the same criticism for his carbonara, so honestly, stop crying (directed at the outraged Italians).”

“I am Italian and we’ve had packaged version of carbonara for ages (frozen, in a pouch with powdered ingredients, etc) so I don’t understand what the big deal is now that it’s in a can..?” said a separate user. “Just don’t buy it, how hard could that be lol.”

Alessandra de Dreuille, meals director at Kraft Heinz, told The Guardian that people are craving “convenient meals that are effortless to prepare.” The canned carbonara hopes to appeal to Gen Z consumers in particular, with Heinz claiming that the pasta “is set to become a new [favorite] amongst the younger generation, scratching the itch for delicious food with no cooking skills required.”    

“Whether enjoyed as a comforting meal after a long day or shared with friends whilst catching up on the latest TV series, Heinz spaghetti carbonara is the perfect fuss-free dinner solution,” de Dreuille added.

Heinz’s Spaghetti Carbonara in a can is only available in the UK. The pasta is currently sold out on its website.

Read more

about carbonara:

“This is a larger issue”: Chappell Roan cancels scalper and bot-owned tickets to help her fans

Securing concert tickets has its challenges but Chappell Roan is ensuring her fans are not left behind because of resellers and bots.

The pop star, who is currently touring across the U.S. and Europe, told her fans that her team had canceled tickets for a future show in Franklin, Tenn., due to many ticket resellers and bots buying tickets. This has made it difficult for Roan's actual fans to obtain reasonably priced tickets to her show. But Roan and her team said they have decided to allow "people who actually want to come" to have a chance to purchase the recovered tickets on a special Ticketmaster page.

Roan said in an Instagram story, “My show at FirstBank Amphitheatre on Oct. 1 sold out really quickly and we figured out why: scalpers and bots just bought up all the tickets."

Related

"That’s not normal. That’s weird": Chappell Roan sets her boundaries with fans and Hollywood

She continued, "So we went through and canceled all the scalper tickets we could. So from that we’re going to release a limited number of tickets to you, because I want to make sure that tickets go to people who actually want to come and, like, our fans.”

The site that will allow fans a chance at Roan tickets for the Oct. 1 show is Chappellroan.request.ticketmaster.com. However, this is not to be confused with the standard Ticketmaster page, which still says the show is sold out, Variety reported.

Roan explained that fans need to pick their preferred tickets and put in a payment method. She did not specify how many tickets will be available for fans. The reissued tickets are sure to sell out as the star is in demand because she is only performing in four other cities across the U.S. this fall. Roan even canceled tour dates in Europe to perform at the MTV VMAs, leading to countless disappointed European fans, Billboard reported.

“I know it sounds so weird but this is the only way we’re figuring out how to deal with it. You will only be charged if your request is fulfilled, so you’ll only get charged if you actually get tickets," she said. "This is the best solution that makes sense to me and my team. I know it’s confusing and it’s so annoying, but I genuinely am so pissed about the scalper situation and think that people actually deserve tickets to my show."

We need your help to stay independent

Subscribe today to support Salon's progressive journalism

“This is a larger issue,” she concluded. "We’re dealing with it. But thank you for understanding, and I can’t wait to see people who deserve to be here. It means everything to me. So, mwah — thank you so much."

Concert tickets have increasingly become more challenging to acquire with recent incidents like the Oasis reunion tour and Taylor Swift's Eras Tour Ticketmaster meltdowns that have spurred American and British governments to take legal action against the ticket-selling platform. Artists have also taken matters into their own hands. 

In 2017, country singer Eric Church took a similar stance to Roan's anti-scalper approach. Church had canceled more than 25,000 tickets for his tour. He stated he was putting them on sale again so that they would hopefully get to his fans, Variety reported.

At the time, Church said that the resellers "buy thousands of tickets across the U.S., not just mine, and they end up making a fortune. They use fake credit cards, fake IDs. All of this is fraud."

Read more

about this topic

JD Vance will join Tucker Carlson on stage after the ex-Fox News anchor hosted a pro-Nazi historian

Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, is scheduled to join former Fox News host Tucker Carlson at the Giant Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on September 21 as part of the political commentator’s own tour, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

The Republican vice presidential nominee will appear as a special guest during the show even though Carlson is presently in hot water for welcoming a pro-Nazi Holocaust revisionist, Darryl Cooper, on his X show Monday. 

During a two-hour friendly interview, Cooper claimed that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War II, the Inquirer noted. Cooper would go on to suggest that Nazi war crimes were a product of the Allies refusing to accept his peace terms; later, on X, he also suggested that France was better off when it was under Nazi occupation.

The interview was condemned by legitimate historians and others opposed to Holocaust revisionism.
 
"Tucker Carlson's praise of Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper is an insult to the memory of the 6,000,000 Jews who were murdered by Hitler's Nazi regime," the Anti-Defamation League posted on X.

Carlson’s platforming of Cooper incited a backlash even among fellow conservatives. Trump critic and former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., wrote on X that Cooper’s remarks were “pro-Nazi propaganda.”

According to the Inquirer, tickets for the Carlson event with Vance are being sold by Ticketmaster for as much as $125.

How a surprise visit from Martha Stewart inspired a restaurant’s signature egg dish

There’s an undeniable allure to a restaurant with a true signature dish. Not a flashy, Instagram-ready gimmick, but a dish that defines the very essence of the kitchen. It’s the kind of plate that tells a story, offering diners a deeper understanding of where they’re eating and the people behind it.

Such is the case for Chef Brian Lewis, the chef-owner of Full House Hospitality Group, whose Maple Bacon & Eggs dish tells a story about both his culinary upbringing — and a memorable run-in with culinary legend Martha Stewart.

When asked in a recent interview with Salon Food if he had a particular dish of which he was proudest, Lewis said “it’s hard to choose just one” as many of his dishes are fluid and serve as building blocks for future creations.

Related

Grill like a chef this Labor Day: Brian Lewis’ charmoula for an ever better BBQ

“Some dishes inspire multiple new ingredients and dishes, while others become iconic for a season, event or specific restaurant."

“One of my most iconic dishes is the Maple Bacon & Eggs: soft farm eggs, candied bacon and robiola fonduta,” Lewis continued. “This dish was inspired by the lazy Saturday morning bacon and scrambled eggs my father made for us as kids."

We need your help to stay independent

Subscribe today to support Salon's progressive journalism

For Lewis, however, the dish’s iconic status was cemented while he was the chef at The Bedford Post Inn, the luxury boutique hotel located in Bedford, New York.

“While I was the Chef at The Bedford Post Inn, Martha Stewart would often visit on horseback, bringing freshly laid eggs from her farm,” he said. “I made this dish the first evening I cooked for her at Bedford Post Inn and it quickly became a signature of the restaurant.”

Want more great food writing and recipes? Subscribe to Salon Food's newsletter, The Bite.

So, think about Lewis and Stewart the next time you whip up a dish when you're having friends over — you never know who might stop in.

Read more

about this topic

“I didn’t expect the impact”: Andra Day reflects on “Rise Up” and why she’s OK being called a “diva”

For the past near decade, "Rise Up" has been an American anthem. The track has been blasted everywhere, from subways stations and youth basketball games, to political campaign rallies and television commercials. Many know the lyrics, but may not know that Andra Day, the songstress behind "Rise Up," is just as inspiring.

Andra Day blew on to the scene with her Grammy Award-winning debut album "Cheers to the Fall." In 2020, she took to the silver screen to star as Billie Holiday in the Lee Daniels film "The United States vs. Billie Holiday." For her performance, Day won a Golden Globe and snagged an Oscar nomination. Day teamed up with Daniels again for the film "The Deliverance," streaming now on Netflix.

"The Deliverance" is a supernatural horror film based on the true story. In the movie, Day plays Ebony Jackson, a single mother of three who fell on hard times, moving her family into three different homes over the course of a few months. This all happens while Jackson's mom Alberta, played by Glenn Close, is getting treated for cancer and loses her insurance coverage, leaving Ebony to pick up the bill. As if things can't get worse, their new home happens to be possessed by the devil.

During our "Salon Talks" conversation, I asked Day how she was able to stomach playing someone going through so much pain, with the backdrop of a demonic presence, in a film that's wrapped in truth. Her answer was simple, "God."

“We've all sort of dealt with pain, we've dealt with trauma, we've dealt with what felt like a hopeless scenario,” Day explained. “But I would argue that maybe more of us have seen God because even the ability to fight through it, I think is actually a godly thing.”

Watch my "Salon Talks" episode with Andra Day here or read the Q&A below to hear more about "The Deliverance," why she couldn’t read the script at night, the joys of staring opposite Close and why her "Rise Up" almost didn’t see the light of day.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Your new movie “The Deliverance” gets described as a horror film, a thriller and as faith-based. What should we expect when watching this?

Thank you for bringing that up, obviously we keep hearing that it's horror because there are horror aspects to the film, but I think that’s actually a really limiting description. It's really made me sort of question the names of genres when it comes to just movies and music in general.

The film has so many different elements. It's really not a traditional horror movie, it's really not a classic horror movie. It's a family drama where my character and the women in this movie are dealing with a lot of generational trauma. So the horror aspect is that they're fighting actual physical demons, fighting the devil. 

It's a movie about a possession. It's based on a true story, but there's also the internal, them battling their own internal demons. So there's that metaphor as well, which makes it a family drama. It's a thriller, it's definitely faith-based. We actually watch her come to faith in the film. It's also definitely a horror movie. There's a lot of aspects to the film, and I think for people who don't typically watch horror, they would be remiss to not see it just based off of that label.

It's a true story. Walking on set, were you scared?

I think initially when I was reading the script, I was scared. I wouldn't read it at night, after the sun dropped, after a certain [time]. I'm so serious. [Laughter.] 

Did you know the story?

I wasn't familiar with the story so it was all new to me. I'm looking at the story and I'm looking at the script, and [Latoya Ammons, who Day’s character is based on] has only done maybe two interviews, maybe, mostly keeps herself from the public. I'm reading this, I'm soaking up the information about it, and after a while I realized, at the end of the day I had to put it down. I was hesitant in the beginning just because I am a believer. I do believe in the spirit realm, and I'm a very spiritual person.

So I think I was of the ilk and of the mindset that we are not supposed to touch those things. We're not supposed to talk about them, we're not supposed to. But then I actually kind of felt sort of what I call conviction, that was like, "No, actually, if I believe these things are real, then I need to show that we have authority over these things." That if you're going to be light in the world, then you should be light in dark places, that's where it works best. I thought it was really beautiful for that. I think people want everything to be clean and perfect all the time, but that's just not the life that we live. I love that it shows that in the movie.

This is where I feel like I'm a horrible capitalist. I was thinking, "Yo, so if I buy a house and then I move in and it’s possessed, you can’t rent it, you can’t give it back, how do you put it back on the market?"

"A day on set was an emotional rollercoaster."

You're a visionary. [Laughter.] Or you know what? Even better than that, make sure the haunting story goes public so somebody can make a movie out of it, and then you can make some money. Now, that's capitalism right there.

The cast was so impressive. You, Mo'Nique, Glenn Close, Caleb McLaughlin and just a collection of other talented people. Lee Daniels directing. I was like, “Yo, is Glenn Close Black and I didn't know? What's happening?”

Oh, child. Oh, she was so locked in.

Glenny from the block.

Yes. [Laughter.] I'm going to tell her about that nickname; she's going to like that. No, she was so locked in. 

What was a day on set like?

A day on set. So first of all, for me, at least the first day on set, very intimidating, but exciting at the same time. I just knew, "If I'm here and I'm present and I'm working hard, I'm going to get a lot from these women, right?" Glenn Close, icon. Mo'Nique, icon. Aunjanue Ellis, same. The kids are iconic. Caleb McLaughlin, "Stranger Things." Demi Singleton, Anthony Jenkins, Omar Epps. I just knew that if I'm present and I'm here, then I know I'm going to glean a lot from Lee, and I know I'm going to glean a lot from them. 

But a day on set was an emotional rollercoaster for sure. There was a lot of prayer on set for those who wanted to pray. It was also funny as hell. I can't help but just sit here and think all of these women on set, they're thespians, they're great. they're amazing at what they do and they're legendary. But they're also hella funny and just really cool at the same time.

Glenn, I love her so much. I still call her “Ma Glenn” because she has such a youthful childlike energy to her. Her energy moving in these spaces, picking up certain things, it was amazing to watch. Mo'Nique is Mo'Nique, so ain't no way you're not going to be laughing all day. On set was an emotional rollercoaster. It was full of laughs, love and light. It was the opposite of what you would think for the movie.

You play Ebony. Ebony has an edge. It comes from addiction, personal setbacks, a complex relationship with her mom. What do you have to do emotionally to convey so much pain? After the first 10 minutes of the film, I'm like, "Check on Andra. Is she OK?"

Yeah. You know what's funny? A friend of mine texted me that. He was like, "I just saw the movie. It's amazing. Do me a favor, go on vacation, please."

From the moment you see her in the film, this is a new start for her, right? She's in a new house, but that does not mean that she's fully healed. She also realizes the pressure is on. What we don't know in the beginning is that DCS is coming for her children, they're not believing her; she is a single mother. You don't know that her mother now lives in the house with her, and it is a troubled relationship. She's facing all this trauma again, so though she is looking forward to this new start, it's about “How do I keep this well of trauma and pain from infiltrating the new life I'm trying to create with my kids?”

It's really interesting. I think I had to deal with my own imposter syndrome and my own, "I am not good enough. There's no way I can make this work." And it's a heavy burden to walk into every day with that weight on your shoulder. For her, it was exponentially more because she's a mother of three kids.

There were actually a lot of things within myself that I had to dredge up and face and reconcile in order to play her. I needed to experience it myself. As a Black woman, we have the experiences, but to actually deal with them and face them, it's really a story of overcoming. So I had to actually face them and go through that process in order to play her properly, if that makes sense.

She made me think of the late great poet Amiri Baraka. He has this poem called “Somebody Blew Up America.” And he has a line, and I'm going to butcher it a little bit, "Few of us have seen God, everyone knows the devil." He's talking about Black people in this country and poverty, and she made me think of that.

Yeah. Wow. Wow. I love that.

What does that line mean to you?

To me personally, it means we have all faced a level of despair that could and should maybe bring most people to hopelessness. It really speaks to me about hopelessness. That's what it sounds like to me.

I think there are a lot of moments in the movie where you will see Ebony and a lot of the characters have to fight hopelessness. We've all sort of dealt with pain, we've dealt with trauma, we've dealt with what felt like a hopeless scenario. But I think I would argue that maybe more of us have seen God than we think, because I think even the ability to fight through it, I think is actually a godly thing.

What kind of advice would you give to a friend who is fighting to overcome their own demons?

I'm a praying person, I'm an obsessively praying person. I believe in the scripture that says to pray without ceasing. I know that not everybody shares the same faith, but in my own, praying before the interaction, that’s something that I do. And then listening, I think that's a really difficult thing for people, including myself, to do sometimes – to really listen and hear what it is they're going through.

"I was obsessed with paleontology at one point."

But the reason I pray before that is because I'm always asking God for insight about not just the words that they're saying, but what's actually happening behind [those words]. My thing would be to pray before the interaction, pray with the person if they're willing, and for them if they're not, and to also listen to them and to abide with them. You know what I mean? To empathize. I think to really go through something with someone, not necessarily that you have to take on the same characteristics. But to go through something with someone, that's grace. I think that's powerful. I think maybe we underestimate the walking, the journey.

The movie is necessary, it's a heavy watch. But I must admit that listening to your new album “Cassandra” was easier on my spirit.

Good, good. Please let it be easier than a demon movie.

It's such a great album. It's inspiring. It's encompassing for the listener. You are an entertainer. Have you always seen yourself as a performer?

Thank you. Yeah, for sure. There was never a plan B. When I was young, I would randomly get interested in things. I was obsessed with paleontology at one point. I was like, "I love dinosaurs. I love fossils and bones. I love digging.” I'd be in the backyard all the time. “Maybe that's what I'll do.” Then I was like, "Maybe I'll be a lawyer," because I just was arguing down when I was a child, but that was never actually real. 

It was always music for me, particularly. I think my only question was really because I went to a performing arts school and the focus was musical theater, "OK, do I do Broadway? Or do I do recorded music?" And that became kind of apparent pretty early on when I was about 14, 15, 16. So no, I've always seen myself as a creative, truly. I've always seen myself as a performer, as an entertainer, and a musician, a singer. It's always been that realm. There's never been anything else.

Do you ever go back and watch things that you've acted in? Did you go back and watch “The United States vs. Billie Holiday”?

No, no, I don't. I think I watched it one time the night before it was supposed to be released, I don't know why. I had a crazy case of FOMO, so I was like, "Oh, let me go watch it." I watched it with my mom. I cried, I just went through all these different ranges of emotion. And then I just put it down and I haven't watched it since.

I was at a different period in my life. I've processed that. That's what I needed to do, and now it's for the world to help them process their things. I've listened maybe a little bit to this album, different songs and different things, especially because social media forces you to look at everything over and over again.

Related

Hulu's irksome "United States vs. Billie Holiday" is a stunning, soul-wrenching debut for Andra Day

I thought you might revisit the music more than a film.

Yeah, but even that, it's not an easy thing for me to do. It's very difficult. I have a couple songs that I'm like, "Oh, maybe this I'll listen to." And like I said, social media, when you're promoting the record, you obviously have to listen to it more. Maybe years down the line I'll kind of revisit things, but usually once it's done, I'm like, "Cool. That chapter's closed for me." Now it's used to help navigate other chapters for other people.

Did you know “Rise Up” was going to be an American anthem? Did you know it was going to blow up like that? Did it happen too fast for you? 

No. It was actually super slow. Now it's so ubiquitous, it just seems like, "Oh, it just popped and it was everywhere very quickly." That was not the case, it was kind of a slow burn. I feel like I did not know that it would be what it has become. To me, that's God, that's the Lord, but I wasn't even going to put it on the original record.

"I actually don't mind the term 'diva.'"

I went in with a finished record, and right before we were about to release, they said, "We want to play you a song." I just remember thinking, "No." And they were like, "You wrote it." And I said, "Well, let me listen to it." So they played it for me, and it just did the thing that it seems to often do now, which is it sort of sucked the air out of the room. 

It was really no argument for me. I was like, "Yeah, no, I agree. This definitely needs to be on the record." But they tried to go juice it up, put this crazy beat on it, and then try to do a DJ beat. Then they tried to do an EDM beat to it, and every time the song was just like, "I am who I am."

Also, I didn't expect the impact to be what it was intra-personally. When I tour and I do meet and greets, I've met more people that have contemplated and attempted to end their own life, I've met more people that have struggled with cancer, had lost a family member, had dealt with depression than I have in my entire life, but it's always actually been a really uplifting experience. I realized, "Oh, I might've thought of success, but I never really thought about impact." And I think God did that.

Did that major success change you as an artist? Or you've always just stuck to what you've been sticking to?

No, I'm like a super diva now, I'm never going back. Just kidding. [Laughter.] 

I actually don't mind the term “diva.” I've discovered in the industry most of the time, the term means a woman who is very clear about what she wants and doesn't want. And so I was like, "Oh, yeah, I'm cool with that."

But no, it changed my mentality toward success and what success is. Now I realize how much more successful it is to have impact in the world, to be impactful. To be intentional about what you do. You might not make a million dollars, but you might change a million lives. Or you might change one life that can change a million lives. So I think that it's just made me much more aware of impact and how that is a lot more important than just monetary success or fame. It's definitely changed me in that way.

I'm hearing you want to do sci-fi next? Is anything in the works?

There's actually nothing in the works right now on sci-fi, but I do want to do it. No, nothing in the works right now. There are a few things that I'm actually producing. I'm really excited about it, I've started working with Thelma and Jackie Wright out of Philly. She was really incredible. She was one of the biggest drug queenpins out of Philly. She had a very, very quiet operation, and it's a very transformational story. It really actually is a story about survival and a mother's love. I really am excited about her having that opportunity to share her story.

Watch more

Salon Talks with D. Watkins

Goldman Sachs report: Harris would likely boost the economy while Trump would stifle growth

Former President Donald Trump has been describing President Joe Biden's administration as a disaster for the economy while presenting himself as the man who will correct course. But analysts from Goldman Sachs warn that it's Trump who would jeopardize an economic recovery with wrongheaded ideas on trade, immigration and other issues.

According to a report released by the investment bank on Tuesday and shared with several news outlets, Trump's policies, if implemented, could cut into the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by as much as half a percentage point in 2025 before it rebounds. Even a small decrease in GDP or just slow growth could lead to widespread unemployment, pay cuts and struggling businesses.

“We estimate that if Trump wins in a sweep or with divided government, the hit to growth from tariffs and tighter immigration policy would outweigh the positive fiscal impulse,” the report said, echoing previous warnings by economists who say that Trump's proposals to raise tariffs and cut taxes will also increase the deficit and inflation rate, not lower them as he has promised.

On the other hand, Goldman predicted that a Kamala Harris presidency and Democratic control of Congress would lead to better economic outcomes, suggesting that spending initiatives and tax credits would "more than offset" any investment slowdown caused by the higher corporate income tax rate that Harris has proposed on the campaign trail. If Harris wins but Congress is divided, the report said, policy changes would be "small" and have little to no effect on the GDP.

Either potential administration may have to deal with changed economic conditions. The Federal Reserve is expected this month to make its first interest rate cut in five years, which some economists view as a sign of confidence amid slowing inflation, while others warn it could send the wrong message about a potential recession and spook investors.

The Harris campaign was quick to capitalize on the Goldman report. “Vice President Harris has a positive vision to strengthen the economy by building up the middle class, cutting taxes and lowering costs for working families and small businesses, and creating opportunities for all Americans to get ahead," a spokesperson said in a statement. "On the economy, the choice could not be any more clear this November."